The latest victims of sexual abuse in schools? Teachers

MY PREP school was a traditional place. It was always cold, the food was inedible (I once found a juicy live maggot in my shepherd’s pie), we swam naked as Spartan youths in the outdoor pool by moonlight on the last day of the summer term (I worried that I dreamt that, but then discovered that at a nearby school, swimming starkers in the 1970s was insisted on at all times, with the children being told: ‘We don’t want to get fibres in the filters’).

And, like many lauded, scholarship-garlanded prep schools of the period, our teaching was first-rate and the masters were sometimes said to have ‘inappropriate’ contacts with the pupils.

I never saw anything and therefore never said anything back then.

I must have intuited on some level that it was so common as to be not worth mentioning – and anyway, letters home were vetted by the headmaster.

Indeed, the accepted euphemism for extracurricular paedophilia across the sector was – and probably still is – ‘the usual thing’. More to the point, when it came to the school, I was happy there.

In fact, it was only years later – having written a sincere, rose-tinted ‘best years of my life’ piece extolling the place which led to angry conversations with several of the now adult victims – that I heard for the first time how it went on: behind closed study doors, in locked masters’ bedrooms after lights out, and even in the cricket pavilion.

I’m in no doubt, therefore, that the ‘usual thing’ goes on.

Two of my teachers were charged this year with historic sexual offences – gross indecency, sexual assaults – between the 1970s and the 1990s and their trials are pending.

I’ve seen the terrible and lasting damage it causes. But I also know this: it was hidden.

So when I read about a popular geography teacher called Kato Harris, 37, who was on trial for allegedly raping a girl three times – during lunch breaks – in an open classroom of a private girls’ school in North London, I smelt the most massive rat. It felt clear to me from the off who was the victim here.

To my mind it wasn’t the girl (unnamed – she was 14), who said she’d be walking down the corridor and Mr Harris would summon her to the geography classroom, and ‘suddenly’ push her to the floor, pull down her tights and pants, and rape her in a brutal fashion.

I’m sorry to have to print this detail, but Mr Harris’s barrister had to ask the defendant during the trial: ‘How feasible would it be for someone to anally rape a girl in a classroom during lunch without being observed?’

As you would imagine, Mr Harris said this was ‘completely unthinkable and impossible’.

The classroom had glass panels in the door and was in full view of passers-by, he went on, and there was ‘frequent people traffic’ around the classroom and patrols by staff.

It took a jury just 26 minutes last week to clear Mr Harris, but this case leaves a stain; not on him, but on the legal process, that somehow allowed this to proceed unchecked to Isleworth Crown Court.

It was a waste of time, of money, and of a teacher’s precious reputation, and adds to a building sense that the huge surge in the reporting and processing of historic sexual abuse claims is turning into a bonanza, Klondike economy for lawyers and probably therapists, too.

THE jury heard how the accuser’s wealthy parents hired a former deputy assistant commissioner of the Met, Sue Akers, and the services of top legal firm Mishcon de Reya, and flew the girl all the way to New York for weekly therapy days. I’m sure the girl’s parents acted in what they felt was their daughter’s best interests when they got in the hired guns to support her – in my view – incredible and damaging accusations.

After all, as we know, schools should be safe, secure and happy environments for children, but they often aren’t.

Teachers should be in loco parentis. But teachers – even talented, dedicated and charming ones – can also be predators.

We must not, however, lose sight of justice in the collective panic over child sex abuse (and even as I write, there is the ghastly news that more than 500 children in Scotland have been identified as potential victims of online sexual abuse).

Kato Harris is currently suspended from his teaching position.

Any school with a sense of honour would reinstate him immediately.

It is only fair play that schools must be ‘safe spaces’ for teachers, too.